Preparing for the Bard

The best way to prepare for a night out with a Shakespearean tragedy is to do a bit of reading up in the afternoon, eat a light supper - perhaps Welsh rarebit - and then arrive early to do some stretching exercises in the foyer before curtain-up.

Last week I chose for the reading section of my regime the relevant chapter of Harold Bloom's book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Bloom has taught Shakespeare at Yale, Harvard, etc, and cannot be accused of indifference to Shakespeare plays. "The accurate stance towards them is one of awe," he writes. "How he was possible, I cannot know." So I was rather surprised to find that Bloom recommends you don't bother to go and see productions of King Lear: "We ought to keep re-reading King Lear and avoid its staged travesties." He suggests that in the modern age we have "difficulty apprehending Shakespeare's hum of thoughts evaded in the mind" (whatever that means), that the king is unplayable, and adds, "I have never seen a passable Edgar."

It's a good job he wasn't at the English Touring Theatre's production of King Lear at Cambridge last week, because he would have cast a Bloom gloom over the evening. The audience was indisputably absorbed, gripped and eventually moved by the unfolding tragedy. As I arrived at the theatre for my limbering-up, a young woman scanning the programme was proclaiming, "Ooh look, Mr Baxter from Grange Hill is playing the Duke of Gloucester." Watching the almost unbearable last scenes of the play, I could hear her sobbing a few seats down from me.

This reminded me of the thing that Professor Bloom fails to take into account: the communality of watching, rather than reading, a play. People in close proximity to me are responding to the same event. Their hearts are beating all around me and their ears are hearing the same poetry as mine. Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended. And Timothy West as Lear, and Nick Fletcher as Edgar are tremendous.

The academic doesn't go to the theatre and the drama critic doesn't go to the actors' bar after the show, which is always the place I like to end the evening if possible. In Cambridge, the excellent Duke of Cornwall bought me a virgin Mary and even laughed indulgently when I did the old gag: "I've never been bought a drink by a pub before." Meanwhile, Cordelia and Regan - the gifted and beautiful actresses Rachel Pickup and Catherine Kanter - allowed me to flirt with them. I can't think why.